MCX, the consortium behind Apple Pay competitor CurrentC, appoints former BoA Merchant Services chief Brian Mooney CEO
Matt Weinberger / Business Insider :
Context & Ripple Effects
When MCX named Brian Mooney, the consortium was still holding its merchant exclusivity line: per Bloomberg's related reporting, member deals keeping Apple Pay out of stores were only beginning to expire just as CurrentC prepared a limited in-store trial. The hire put a Bank of America Merchant Services veteran at the top of a retailer-owned counterstrike against a platform wallet.
What followed frames this appointment: within a year MCX had postponed CurrentC's rollout, laid off 30 staff, and pivoted toward bank partnerships, then shut down all beta accounts by late June 2016 — while member CVS went its own way with its own CVS Pay app. Mooney's tenure is the hinge between the consortium's ambitions and that unraveling.
First-order effects
- Mooney takes over a product that has not launched broadly, inheriting the job of convincing member retailers to stay inside the MCX exclusivity framework rather than sign with Apple Pay as those agreements lapse.
Second-order effects
- Member merchants hedge: CVS's decision to build CVS Pay in-house shows retailers concluding they can capture mobile payments themselves instead of routing through the consortium, weakening MCX's collective bargaining position.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, merchant consortia cede the wallet layer to platform owners — and Apple's reported expansion into payment processing, lending risk assessment, and fraud analysis shows the wallet winner moving deeper into the financial stack the retailers tried to keep closed.
The trend: Retailer-owned payment coalitions are losing to platform wallets, with members defecting to proprietary apps while the winning wallet owner absorbs more of the payments value chain.